Tag Archives: artificial intelligence

Mónia Camacho of Portugal made this short science fiction piece about a fragmentary broadcast from an alien artificial intelligence. There’s some talent here. The film is made in the simplest possible fashion but conveys some interesting emotions and ideas. I think the film should be expanded into something quite a bit longer. The odd, almost out of place expressions of the character make me curious. I want the AI to ramble on for a while. That final landscape shot is fantastic. You could almost take this short film and drop it right into a Tarkovsky film like Solaris. It would fit.

Adam Curtis makes fascinating documentary films for the British Broadcasting Corporation. This one is about the manipulation of memory, or the attempt to manipulate it, by governments during the Cold War era. It features several scientists and psychology experts who worked for either the U.S. or Soviet governments trying to figure out how to control minds.

I post the work of Curtis because his filmmaking is actually quite a lot like my own in several ways. This film bears a relationship to my latest film, Yellow Plastic Raygun, which is also about memory and how it influences the future. Curtis dwells in the domain of documentary, a form that I have serious misgivings about, while I dwell in the domain of art – or direct mind control if you will! I like Curtis’ use of corporate, military, instructional, and entertainment films as his raw visual material. He mixes it up with what is actually a rather simplistic script relating information that is not especially insightful. The film seems to suggest something more under the surface because of its imagery which often bears no relationship whatsoever to the information being related by the voice-over. This is a tricky area for documentary that brings it perilously close to the realm of art. You don’t quite know what it is that you are actually watching. I like that but I also distrust it. But Curtis appears to me to be making a documentary about his own feelings and artistic interpretations of the factual material. He is not trying to teach or inform at all. He is simply trying to create an impression. The words of the documentary could be replaced with gibberish. In fact, it would probably be a slightly better film if they were!

The Living Dead – Part 1 (watch the next 5 parts after the jump)

Memory is perhaps the single most important quality of existence. We are simply memory machines walking around and recording. All of our activities point toward an ever-increasing ability to record and remember. We are building memory. The idea, pursued in the first half of this documentary, of wiping out unpleasant memories that are assumed to be destroying the health of an individual, seems to me to be misguided and foolish. I have always viewed it as the job of every human to be able to stare straight into the most horrific scene, remember it, and not allow it to take control. Very simple. You must be able to look at anything… and continue to eat your ice cream.

Using IBM computers, Dr. Henry Markram is building a model of the human brain that he hopes will take about 10 years to complete. Filmmaker Noah Hutton is chronicling the endeavor in an ongoing documentary that will be finished once the brain model exists. This is one of the most fascinating and important efforts I have ever heard about in modern science. The brain project is called Blue Brain and is located at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. The idea to build a model based on minute and precise observations of how the brain synapses and cells actually work is a good one. Dr. Markram emphasizes that once you understand certain principles you can start to build models that increase in complexity and accuracy until you have have an understanding of how things work. Careful observation and exact mimicry will lead to a functioning model. Markram goes further to say that eventually you will be able to teach the model languages and watch it learn. He’s talking about artificial intelligence. He’s talking about making a machine think.

This is the modern world’s alchemy. The simplistic understanding of Medieval alchemy is that it was the attempt to turn base metals into gold. We are now trying to turn base metals into thinking beings. It is a logical thing to do. Think about it. Every household and every pocket in almost every developed nation on earth has a small thinking machine in it. What does that really tell you? It tells me that our main effort on a planetary scale – a human species level – is to make machines think. We aren’t going to the moon. Or going to Mars. Or trying to travel to the stars. What we’re actually doing is trying to make metal and electricity think. To live.

A working model of a brain is going to take us places we never thought we could go.

Search The Site

Search for:

Get The Adventure Book

FREE ABC LEARNING FOR CLASSROOMS

About The Site

Films, photography, short stories, and games are the primary areas covered here.

More than just opinions, you will find original films produced by your editor, Alessandro Cima. The films range from kid-friendly animations to horror, documentary and experimental film works intended for gallery and festival showings.

You will also find a collection of original games that may appeal to those still enjoying the pleasures of unique independent browser games programmed in Flash.

Then there are the original audio stories for children, including a wild pirate adventure and some classic novels.

Dig into the stories menu for a collection of illustrated tales that first found an audience for this site.

Join the social networks. If you have a film to show, check out the Vimeo short film group.